A cruise liner curves elegantly across a printed sea; above it, the
large, red letters USSR blaze out of a yellow sky.

A postcard
superimposed on these letters, with a Soviet stamp and a US address,
reads: “This is more than a pleasure trip – it is a voyage into a new
world.”

The exhibition showcases travel posters. Source: PressPhoto

The slogan could not be more apt for this first flowering of a
brand new space for art and design in central London with an exhibition
of 1930s travel posters.

GRAD, the new Gallery for Russian Arts and Design, is a wood-floored,
well-lit space near Oxford Street in central London.

Its inaugural
exhibition, “See USSR”, running until 31st August, showcases some
beautiful, art deco-style Intourist posters, such as Alexander
Zhitomirsky’s iconic “Georgian Military Highway” in which a bright blue,
open-topped car rolls merrily along the precipitous mountain road with
snowy peaks in the distance.

The USSR travel poster. Source: PressPhoto

These posters, printed in several languages, portray a depoliticized
and visitor-friendly Soviet Union, employing skilled artists to combine a
westernised aesthetic with distinctive landscapes.

They were aimed at
foreign visitors and rarely seen within Russia until recently. An
exhibition in Moscow’s Vinzavod cultural center three years ago included
some of the posters currently on show at GRAD.

Sergei Sakharov’s white, Crimean castle above a deep blue, cerulean
ocean, fringed by peach and pine branches is the kind of advertising
that pulls the viewer into paradise.

Maria Nesterova’s “USSR Health
Resorts”, with its orange parasol and palm trees, is equally appealing,
but the effect of her 1937 “Baku” is more complicated; the metal towers
and oil tanks in the foreground evoke industrial pride rather than
sightseeing.

The new gallery’s director, Elena Sudakova, has co-curated the
exhibition together with Irina Nikiforovna, head of the show-stopping
department of 19th and 20th century European and American art in
Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.

The idea for GRAD sprang out of a
conversation between the two of them a year ago.

The USSR travel poster. Source: PressPhoto

Sudakova hopes to build on her links with several Moscow museums to
explore “stylistic and aesthetic correspondences” between Russia and
various countries.

She acknowledges the work of pre-existing
organisations like Pushkin House and Calvert22 in raising awareness of
Russian art in London, but feels it is still under-represented and hopes
eventually to establish a permanent Museum of Russian Art in the city.

John Milner, a professor at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art,
speaking at gallery’s opening, described the “east-west conversation in
these posters” as a great way to launch GRAD and to build bridges, not
only between cultures, but also between academic and commercial fields
in art history.

Milner has been instrumental in the recreation of a lost
poster, in which dynamic figures are “golfing, sightseeing, drinking
and enjoying themselves in the sunshine” on the letters USSR.

Themes are identified in the exhibition, including cultural
attractions, national minorities and “travelling in style”. Festivals of
dance and theatre, concerts, rowing on sunlit rivers, hunting, skiing
and spa visits entice would-be travelers.

The curators point out how the
artists were inspired by 1920s and ’30s western travel posters, in the
art deco sweep of a railway bridge or a glamorous woman with her scarf
blowing in the wind.

The leisured journeys depicted are distinctly at
odds with the tractor-driving peasants and factory workers of internal
Soviet propaganda.

Filmmaker and critic Lutz Becker similarly observed at the gallery’s
opening how in the Soviet reality “local languages and cultures were
suppressed,” but in the fairytale world of the tourist posters, “there
is still a celebration of variety.”

These complex undercurrents are part
GRAD’s new dialogue between art and history, explored through a program
of seminars and publications.

Alongside the posters are travel magazines and a series of printed
textiles from the Trekhgornaya Factory, which show contrasting images.

Related:

Where the posters depict an elegant, luxurious destination, these
fabrics, designed for the domestic market, are all workers and weaponry,
machines and revolutionary leaders.

Sudakova is hoping to find corporate funding for her not-for-profit
gallery to continue her program of “rarely seen graphic arts … from
Russian collections and specially commissioned pieces.”

The next
exhibition, scheduled this autumn, plans to use scale models of Vladimir
Tatlin’s twisting, constructivist “Monument to the Third
International” and the futuristic Gazprom Tower as the basis for debates
about Russian, Utopian architecture.